War is Peace and Content Moderation is Free Speech

The censors are convincing themselves using doublespeak again.

“War is Peace

Freedom is Slavery

Ignorance is Strength”

These words from George Orwell’s ‘1984’ were the official slogans of ‘the Party’. By using doublethink, the Party was able to weaken an individual’s naturally strong mind. Once an individual has been weakened by doublethink, the Party can make them believe whatever they want, however illogical it is.

Sadly, Orwell’s warnings were ignored and now, in 2024, we are constantly subjected to doublethink.

Take for example recent comments by an associate professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington, Kate Starbird. Her talk, “Reflections on Disinformation, Democracy, and Free Expression”, which ironically was held in the Bill and Melinda Gates Hall, looked at disinformation and her concern that content moderation was being rebranded as censorship.

“Then in 2022, the harassment began. Starbird and her team experienced online insults and threats, lawsuits, a congressional investigation and dozens of public records requests looking for evidence of government collaboration and social media censorship. Purveyors of disinformation who benefit from deceiving people were attempting to discredit her and her work, and to rebrand content moderation, information literacy efforts and her entire area of study – all valid acts of free speech – as censorship, she said.”

That’s right… Content Moderation is Free Speech!

This Orwellian idea was quickly jumped on by other professors such as Timothy Caulfield.

Caulfield is correct on one point - the marketplace of ideas should be used to tackle misinformation. Except that marketplace needs to be a FREE marketplace. In a free marketplace of ideas, misinformation mongers would very quickly go out of business.

However, as many of us have suspected for a while (and has been proven during the pandemic), the marketplace is not free and is constantly interfered with by governments forcing social media companies to censor opposing views.

Suppressing somebody’s views is censorship whether you call it content moderation or not. In reality, content moderation exists because some people think they are better than you and more clever than you. They want to control what you read, what you say an ultimately what you think.